SD Card Adapter Finally Coming

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Nintendo sets a release date in Japan.

By IGN Staff

Nintendo of Japan today announced that it would release the long-awaited SD Card Adapter for GameCube on July 18 in Japan. The cost of the bridge is unknown. No US release date has yet been penciled in, but one is likely to be made known at the Electronics Entertainment Expo 2003 this May in Los Angeles.

The SD Card Adapter enables GameCube owners to connect SD cards to the console and save data from specific games to them. The data can then be transferred to a computer and traded with friends over Internet e-mail. SD Card holders may also download data from Nintendo that can be saved to the devices and then used in some GameCube titles.

The first title to use the SD Card Adapter will be Animal Crossing e+, a Japanese conversion of the US Animal Crossing +. Players will be able to trade data without going to their friends' houses in the game by using the cards. The title is scheduled to ship in Japan on June 27.

The bad news is that the SD Cards cannot substitute for standard Memory Cards because games have to be specifically programmed to make use of them. Therefore, older software will not work with the storage devices, as much as gamers might prefer to transfer all of their data to the larger-sized media.